Trying to Be by John Haskell is the winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award for books published in 2025

In addition to naming three finalists each year, we also present The Story Prize Spotlight Award to a collection of exceptional merit. Selected books can be promising works by first-time authors, collections in alternative formats, or works that demonstrate an unusual perspective on the writer's craft. The award includes a prize of $1,000. 

Trying to Be by John Haskell (FC2) is the 14th winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. Chosen from among the 114 books we received as entries in 2025, this slender collection of nine stories walks the line between the essay and the short story, exploring aspects both of trying and being through the lenses of painting, film, dance, and both public and private histories. Touchstones include painters Francis Bacon and Diego Velasquez, German radical and journalist Ulrike Meinhof, dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, actor Danny Kaye, the author's Aunt Dot, and characters in films such as Blow-Up and Five Miles to Midnight. 

John Haskell’s other books include I Am Not Jackson Pollock, American Purgatorio, Out of My Skin, and The Complete Ballet, a fictional essay. He has been a performer and playwright, written artist catalogues, and contributed to books. His fiction and nonfiction pieces have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper’s, Conjunctions, The Baffler, and The Yale Review. He is a contributing editor at BOMB and A Public Space, and has performed on the radio shows The Next Big Thing and Studio 360. His awards include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and several NYFA grants, and he’s taught writing and literature around the world. Trying to Be was the 2025 winner of FC2's Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize.

The 13 previous winners of The Story Prize Spotlight Award were: Drifting House by Krys Lee, Byzantium by Ben Stroud, Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor, Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar, Subcortical by Lee Conell, Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy, The Trojan War Museum by Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Inheritors by Asako Serizawa, Born Into This by Adam Thompson, God's Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu, The Goth House Experiment by SJ Sindu, and, most recently, The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck. 

You can find links to all fourteen books, including Haskell's, on Bookshop, in the list Winners of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. And you can also find Trying to Be on the list The Story Prize: 2025 collections received.

We'll announce the winner of The Story Prize on March 31 at a private event, which we'll live stream, featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists: Other Worlds by André Alexis, Atavists by Lydia Millet, and Other Worlds by Ayşegül Savaş. And soon we'll post a long list of additional short story collections published in 2025.

The 2024/25 Story Prize Finalists Are André Alexis, Lydia Millet, and Ayşegül Savaş

The Story Prize, now in its 22nd year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 114 submissions representing 72 different publishers or imprints. 

• Other Worlds by André Alexis (FSG Originals)
• Atavists by Lydia Millet (W.W. Norton)
• Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury)

Other Worlds employs fanciful and formally inventive narratives to deftly explore issues of culture, race, sex, and class. Atavists charts a constellation of characters in a Los Angeles-area town, delineating contemporary anxieties, ambitions, and mores with a cool but sympathetic eye. The elegant stories in Long Distance—set in locales such as Paris, Rome, Istanbul, and Marseilles—subtly and poignantly depict the inner lives of characters struggling with displacement despite having chosen it.

We'll announce the winner of The Story Prize on the evening of Tuesday, March 31, at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with finalists Alexis, Millet, and Savaş. The winner will receive the top prize of $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The runners-up will each receive $5,000. We will live-stream the event starting at 7:30 p.m. and will post a link before then and the final video in the days that follow. 

Story Prize Founder Julie Lindsey and Director Larry Dark selected the finalists. These three independent judges will determine the winner:

• Writer and copyeditor Benjamin Dreyer;
• Writer and past Story Prize winner Ling Ma; and
• Librarian Stephen Sposato.

In the weeks ahead, we'll announce this year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. We'll also publish a longlist of other exceptional collections we read last year. You can find a complete list of the story collections we received in 2025 on Bookshop.org.